Month in Review: April & May 2026

[mysterytoast]

April 2026:

Completions -

• Unboxathon

New games -

• KuloNiku (started 4/5/26)
• Pokopia (started 4/9/26)
• Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream (started 4/16/26)
• Seeds of Calamity (started 4/15/26)
• Unboxathon (started 4/11/26)
• Xenoblade Chronicles X (started 4/15/26)

Continued playing -

• A Little to the Left
• Slay the Spire II
• V Rising

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May 2026:

Completions:

• LiEat (finished 5/31)

New Games:

• LiEat (started 5/3)
• Machick (started 5/9)
• Slime Rancher (started 5/16)

Continued Playing:

• A Little to the Left
• Final Fantasy XV
• Tomodachi: Living the Dream

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I missed April by quite a bit, so I've combined April and May together. 

April was a month of me spending a lot of money on gaming stuff. This wasn't even due to me collecting more things for the eternal backlog, it was because I did my taxes and immediately got a Switch 2, plus Pokopia and Tomodachi Life. I had gotten a prescient feeling of dread that the PS5's price increase meant something inevitable… and I was right. I may have jumped a bit early since the US is getting a bundle that includes a Pokopia code, but I don't regret getting it in April - the screen is shockingly good for a non-OLED screen (even better than the OLED Steam Deck, granted I do have a matte screen), and XCXDE looks really good on it. And because of the way accounts work, I can still use my Switch 1 as a dedicated fitness games console, now without worrying about swapping out carts all the time.

May mostly consisted of me being out for several weeks and playing FFXV in the meantime. It is shockingly unbalanced? It was pretty well-documented that this game went through a number of issues in development but the resulting product is just so egregious in how that manifests. Pretty large open world that opens up through the first third of the chapters, then a bunch of dungeon chapters in a row, and then a literal railroad sequence of chapters that drag you through the end of the game. Chapter 7-ish through the end goes so quickly if you don't intentionally go back to the overworld to do side content, and even then just doing sidequests isn't enough to distract from the extremely short chapters. Some games can compress massive plot developments into a short period of time and make it feel substantial (FFXIV did this really well in ShB and EW), but FFXV did not strike that balance. It's just such a shame, what happened to this game, because despite all its flaws I just can't see it as an overtly bad game. So many portions are mediocre and yet it is greater than the sum of its parts... and it's still not that good.